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We've had lots of cats that have wandered off and... but that was the thing about the name, everybody congratulated us on the name Beagle 2 as inspirational, until after it didn't call in and we had all manner of e-mails, texts, telephone calls, letters saying didn't you realise that Beagles are the worst dogs you could possibly have to let off the leash - they run off, they chase something, they don't come back when they're called, they only come home when they're hungry and they show no sign of remorse.

Democrats, Republicans... anyone who thinks there's actually a difference between them is a dumbass.

It does seem to matter when it comes to picking Supreme Court Justices. Nobody would claim that Alito and Scalia are interchangeable with Kagan and Sotomayor. Are you really saying it doesn't matter who chooses the next few justices?

There is also the five-finger speech. It generally comes when a new clerk asks, in dismay and outrage, how a majority of the Court has arrived at a decision he or she feels is flagrantly unjust. Justice Brennan holds up his hand, wriggles his five fingers, and says, “Five votes. Five votes can do anything around here.”

..in-car devices that insurance companies use to monitor policyholders' driving

Over my dead body.
*find tiny cellphone antenna*
*SNIP*

If you're a clever insurance company you ask people if they want tracking in return for lower premiums. If your competitors are charging $300, you make the "no" people pay $315 and the "yes" people people pay $285. Then all the bad drivers and all the people concerned about privacy go off to another insurance company. Given the success of Facebook and Twitter, it looks like only 0.001% of the population cares about privacy. Therefore 99+% of the people who move across to your competitors are probably not very profitable anyway. Win-win!

So it's saying "yes" or "no" to the tracking device that is the important part, not the driving data. As long as you have enough blinky lights (and a few real 3G connections) so people think they might be monitored, then you are golden.

For somw reason, it wouldn't surprise me if these two craft collided, despite being the only two approaching the entire planet. It just seems that any time a government spends a lot of money to do anything, it normally ends with a fail worthy of Monty Python.

There's a lot of exciting stuff happening right now. The Dawn mission is on its way to get a close look at Ceres in April next year. Rosetta is sending a lander onto a comet (which is about to do the exciting thing for comets - i.e. go near the sun). New Horizons is going to fly past Pluto next July. There are two rovers exploring Mars. Not to mention Cassini, Messenger, etc. You can be negative if you like, but I think these missions are pretty amazing.

You can sign up for our flat rate Gold Plan at $1000, or the Silver Plan where we will nickel and dime you until you pay $2010 per year, or the Bronze Plan where you will get some carefully selected ads in return for a lower fee of $500.

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Notes: (1) You may occasionally see ads, (2) Ads you don't see will still count against your bandwidth cap, (3) We hate you.

Yes. They will have a dual stack with the IPv6 address being used for a bigger and bigger proportion of traffic. Meanwhile IPv4 will probably traverse some NAT.

Once IPv4 is the minority of traffic (many years in the future), it will turn into a legacy PITA to administer separately. But that is a while away.

IPv6 is much more complex, how will companies support users who barely understand IP addressing when IPv6 is going to seem like a long string of meaningless characters?

Those 30% of Comcast customers aren't calling a helpdesk and reading out hexadecimal digits. If DNS is working they will say things like "www.facebook.com". If DNS isn't working then they can't fix it by reading out or typing those "meaningless characters".

Do you see something like a dynamic IPv6 to IPv4 DNS/NAT translator to hide IPv6 complexity from the user a viable solution?

Not viable. It wouldn't help more than a single digit percentage of users anyway.